From: dks@MIT.EDU (dks) Newsgroups: alt.fan.dan-quayle Subject: Jerry Brown: 'Last Best Hope On Earth' Message-ID: <9207161209.AA13600@MIT.EDU> Date: 16 Jul 92 13:06:40 GMT Lines: 251 X-Received: by usenet.pa.dec.com; id AA29435; Thu, 16 Jul 92 05:10:34 -0700 X-Received: by inet-gw-1.pa.dec.com; id AA16002; Thu, 16 Jul 92 05:10:31 -0700 X-Received: from TMS-PORT-11.MIT.EDU by MIT.EDU with SMTPid AA13600; Thu, 16 Jul 92 08:09:31 EDT X-To: alt.fan.dan-quayle.usenet X-Command: Send_AEvt(doAutoForward) Hello! By popular request, here is Jerry Brown's speech. Cheers, Dhanesh ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Jerry Brown's Speech: 'Last Best Hope On Earth' --- NEW YORK, July 15, 1992 Here is the prepared text of the speech delivered on Wednesday night by former California Gov. Jerry Brown to the Democratic National Convention: Almost a year ago when this journey began, it was evident we faced not merely another election but the deepening crisis of democracy itself. What was at stake was nothing less than the life of our nation, its core princi- ples, the last best hope on earth. President Lincoln faced a crisis too. It led to a bloody civil war triggered by a secession of one-third the states. Today half the people individually have seceded from our political democracy because they don't believe their vote makes any difference. They're out there and we got to go get them back. Those of us on the inside find it easy to fall into the complacent illusion that we're making change when we engage in politics and speak of change. But the growing skepticism and discontent in every corner of America with a party system and the refusal to vote on the part of the majority has to sound an alarm on the part of all of those who care to listen. You know and everyone watching knows that effective government is breaking down, the system is paralyzed and as a result our society deteriorates. Even to convene here, the homeless had to be swept off the streets and out of sight. Tonight one out of every five of our children is in poverty. Millions of their parents are laboring for $4.25 an hour. Men and women who have worked their whole lives are sitting idle as smug custodians of global finance lose their jobs to Mexico. The air, the soil and the water are poisoned for profit's sake. And the future of our grandchildren is stolen to pay for the most bloated arms industry ever to exist in a time of peace. And it's not right. Instead of government by the people and for the people and of the people, President Bush and his allies give us government of, by and for the privileged. (inaudible) but the growing concentration of wealth beyond any boundary of nation or conscience and its influence over our governing institutions through money. Whatever nice programs we speak of, whatever dreams we share, unless the basic fact of unchecked power and privilege is acknowledged and courageously challenged, nothing will ever change. President Bush talks of AFDC - Aid to Families with Dependent Children - as though these thoroughly powerless people caused our present predicament. Yet he and his reactionary allies hypocritically overlook the real AFDC - aid to financially dependent corporations. They love subsidies, loan guarantees, giveaways of natural resources and our public lands, tax breaks, just add 'em up. Tens of billions of dollars of federal welfare payments to well-connected corporations. It's far more than all the welfare mothers put together can ever dream, much less obtain, through the paltry payments they receive every month. In recent months President Bush has demanded so far unsuccessfully $10 billion in debt forgiveness that the nuclear power utilities owe Uncle Sam for uranium enrichment. At the same time Bush and his Republican allies are fighting against fully funding Head Start, the auto safety agency, infant nutrition, immunization programs, drinking water safety programs, the meat and poultry inspection service, the Occupational Health and Safety Agency, and federal cancer prevention programs. All these efforts to save life and promote health are less than three-quarters than the money that Bush wants to give in forgiveness to those utilities. It's the Democrats that are stopping the giveaways and together we will continue to block giveaways and fight for the people we serve. In the New Hampshire primary, a woman stood up in a town meeting and asked me about jobs for her unemployed neighbors. She said they wanted to work as teachers and nurses aides and they didn't want much. They'd be glad to work for $5.50 an hour. It shocked me when she stood up at that town meeting. But local officials she said said there was no federal money. Yet the resolution trust company of that same federal government was ladling out $600 an hour to pay one lawyer working a few dozen blocks from here to clean out the S&L mess that all the lawyers and investment bankers and politicians created in the first place. When I heard that woman speak, it really hit me, it was not lack of federal money. It was lack of her political power. It was that power for the powerless that we've come here to create and create we will. Whatever the odds, whoever the adversaries, however long it takes, we will create the power for the powerless for there is no other reason for a Democratic Party to exist. Except for the influence of power and money, how can we explain why high price corporate lunches are tax deduct- ible but not the hard-earned tuition payments of struggling students. You tell me cause you know the answer. It's money, it's contacts, it's everything that's wrong with this country. Except for the influence of power and money, how can we explain the tens of thousands of homeless men and women and children in our streets, doubled up in hallways for lack of federal housing assistance, when billions and I mean billions go to subsidized mortgages for millionaires. It's not right. And we've got to do something about it. Except for the influence of power and money, how do you explain billions that go for nuclear submarines with non-existent missions while desperate cries from our cities, they go unheeded. Are our mayors wrong or do they just lack the special influence to get things done in Washington? The billion dollars the cities got a few weeks ago is less than one day of additional borrowing on our national debt that we do every day of this year. For many, many years, I believed that we could change politics through a series of changes, some small, some large but all within the framework of politics as we know it. Progressive appointments, more money for college scholarships, good environmental laws, urban assistance programs. Yet when I was governor I'm sorry to acknowledge wages towards the end started to fall. Factory jobs started moving abroad and the numbers of the poor started to grow. Ten years later South Central Los Angeles exploded. How I tried to make that system work as governor of California. And then more recently as party chairman I raised the money, we registered the voters and what incredible campaigns with our statewide candidates devoting every working day, collecting thousands of dollars, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, from the top 1 percent of income earners but always far removed from ordinary people. But victory, it still eluded us. So we were counseled to raise even larger sums to overcome the opposition and the voter indifference. But in my heart I knew then and I know now the problem is not the lack of money. There is not enough and there will never be enough to buy back the disappearing loyalty of the disillusioned. It's not there. What we need is something more basic. We have to break the growing and dangerous tie-in of economic and political power. We have to save our souls as Democrats, return to our roots, listen to our ancestors and once again fight on the side of the people who pay the bills and fight the wars but never come to our reception. Those are the people I want to fight for. I know you want to fight for them. And we have to show it as we walk out of here. Let's put it simply. The words of politics will remain empty forever unless we challenge and challenge honestly and directly and in a measurable and credible way the corrupt money and the influence that today powers our campaigns and puts our words and faces across TV screens in five and ten and $20 million campaigns. We got to get at that root or we're never going to build the trees of progress. That's what started this candidacy, as much a cause as a campaign, to redeem our own past and reclaim what belongs to all of us, our democracy and real justice, social and economic. We didn't begin out of political analysis or personal calculation, but out of moral necessity to speak truth to power. That's what we did, that's what we're doing and we'll continue to do that. Our goal was to give people, especially those who stopped believing, a real choice and an equal opportunity to participate. That's why we limited donations to $100 and we relied on an 800 number. We wanted people who had no access, who didn't know any particular person with power, we wanted them to take ownership of this cause. You see I don't believe that our predicament can be resolved by the election of any one politician, even a president. The future will be determined not in the White House or on Capitol Hill alone, but it has to be won in every living room and every company office and every classroom and every neighborhood in America. What we need is not a campaign as usual. We need a common cause to recast the nation's politics, revive our democracy and reclaim our economic future. Listen to our founder, Thomas Jefferson, when he said: ''The purpose of representative government was to counteract the excesses of a (inaudible) interest.'' And to President Andrew Jackson, when he stated: ''When a democracy is in trouble, the remedy is more democracy.'' That's why every citizen in America should have not only the right but the real opportunity to vote. And it's the responsibility of government to ensure that by registering every American, and that's why we have to fight to see that government does the job with all its bureaucracy and its computers. They know how to get our taxes. Why don't they get our votes and the votes of everyone in this country. That's why we have to fight to take back the airwaves and make it possible for candidates to speak to the people and for the people to hear them on television without the corrupting influence of money. That's why we have to fight to take back our own post office, so candidates and parties and people can communicate without mortgaging their future and their integrity to the special interest. That's a basic right. Why can't we make it free and available to those who wish to participate? And that's why we have to ban political action committees so people and corporations are put on the same level. And that's why we have to fight to ensure that the minimum wage, the presidential wage and the congressional wage show we're all in it together, all together and the closer the better. That's where solidarity comes from. Let's not get fooled by the false populism that comes to us out of the concentration of wealth and power we're sworn to oppose. Outside of advertising, there's no such thing as a billion dollar populist. Mr. Perot, we can afford to pay for our own democracy. We don't need you to lend it to us. And with these tools of democracy, we're going to move to higher ground and restore the promise of democracy and then truly we'll be able to fight trade treaties that reduce wages and then weaken environmental standards. We'll fight to ensure that every child has a decent education and every family a decent house and every single American the decent health care they deserve. We can fight to see that we have an environment that isn't poisoned but depends on clean renewable energy that the people of this country make for themselves. Ours is the oldest party in the world. Whatever change had to be made in this country, in this century that is, it was made through the Democratic Party. But the real changes, the things that really shook things up, these came from below, from the people themselves. The Democratic Party gave us the Wagner Act in the '30s for working people but it was only after brave men and women marched and picketed even under death that that law went on the books. In the '60s the Democratic Party gave us civil-rights laws but only after a courageous woman, Rosa Parks, refused the back of the bus. And tens of thousands of ordinary people marched and protested and went against what was popular even to the point of their own blood and even their own lives. And it's the Democratic Party today which stands behind the women of America in protecting the right to choose. But it was one woman, Anita Hill, who galvanized us all, by standing up and speaking truth to power. It's the Democratic Party which has the courage and the decency to champion in its platform the rights of gay and lesbian Americans. But only because courageous men and women were not afraid to talk back, act up and call us to our better selves. Conventions and nominations are never endings, but only steps along the way. I intend to fight for this party, its ideals, tonight, tomorrow, this year and every year until together we overcome. I want you to join me in that undertaking. And as we join together in this spirit, no obstacles will stand in our way. Victory will be ours because in our veins runs the blood who those at the darkest hour gave their lives so this nation under God should have a new birth of freedom and that a government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth. We shall overcome, all of us, together, working for what we believe. Thank you very much. ----------- End of text ------ Brown, 7/15/92 p.m. -------------------